Aussie rules: great wines from Down Under

Taste the sunshine: vineyards in New South Wales, Australia.
Photograph: Australian Scenics/Getty Images

Parker Favourite Son Coonawarra, Australia 2014 (£7.49, Waitrose) Part of the reason the British first fell in love with Australian wine was its price. It wasn’t always the cheapest on the shelf, but you frequently got more fruit and easy, soft charm for your money than in, say, France or Italy. That hasn’t really been the case more recently. Generally speaking, Australian wine has got much better – more diverse, interesting, balanced – but largely, if not exclusively thanks to the strong Aussie dollar, many retailers I speak to say they find it harder to score genuine bargains. Harder, but not impossible. There is a great deal of ripe blackcurrant-juicy pleasure to be found, for example, in this succulent red from the classic South Australian cabernet sauvignon district of Coonawarra.

Berton Vineyards The Black Shiraz, Australia 2016 (£7.99, The Co-op) A lot of modern Australian winemakers bristle at a persistent cliché about their industry: that all they really do is make simple, oaky chardonnay and brawny fruit-bomb shiraz. Of course, it’s possible to find cool, sappy beaujolais-like gamay, elegant pinot noir and all manner of exotic Spanish-, Italian-, Greek- and Portuguese-inspired styles in the country now. But it has to be said the country’s pre-eminent position in the UK’s wine shops (where it sells more than twice the amount of wine of its nearest rivals, Italy) is largely down to those traditional strengths. Still, when they are as well put-together as Berton’s rich, rippling, broad-shouldered but, crucially, fresh-finishing shiraz, I see no reason to complain.

Blind Spot Yarra Valley Chardonnay, Victoria, Australia 2016 (£9.50, The Wine Society) The best-value Australian wines in the UK are stocked by the members-only Wine Society. As I’ve written before, the £40 fee for a lifetime’s membership of this co-operative is well worth paying if you get through a lot of wine – the prices are never less than competitive, with the Blind Spot range a standout. Sourced by one of Australia’s best winemakers, Mac Forbes, it runs to eight wines at the moment, with new parcels coming and going as Forbes finds them. Of the reds, the GSM 2015 (£8.95) is bright and spicy like a very good Côtes du Rhône, while the chardonnay, from Forbes’s own vines, is chiselled, mineral and extremely classy.

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